Voices of the Santee Delta: Oral history interview with Bill Mace
Date:
2016
Interviewer:
Raynor, Robert, 1951-
Interviewee:
Mace, Bill
Description:
Bill Mace grew up in Johnsonville, SC, and fished on the Lynches and Pee Dee Rivers. He learned to fish from his father, and to hunt from his grandfathers. On a fourteen-foot boat he and his brother continued to venture further on fishing, hunting, and camping trips down river to Sandy Island and Georgetown. During high school Mace worked at a wool mill, but wanted to find a job in the outdoors. After high school he went to school in Anderson for a year, considered transferring to Clemson for parks and recreation, but instead came back to Georgetown and went to work at a textile plant. Mace went to a meeting with the director of the South Carolina Game and Fish Division who encouraged him to get an associate degree in wildlife management. He attended Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Georgia, and was offered a job at Santee Coastal Reserve (SCR) by Tommy Strange in 1976. Among other tasks, Mace managed former rice fields. He took over as manager when Strange retired, and worked there for 21 years. Mace discussed brackish water management in the 24,000-acre SCR, and the constant work to repair and replace water-control structures. Mace imagined the Santee Delta before it was cleared for rice fields, and the enormous labor involved in building the rice field dikes, constructed by enslaved workers. Mace also discussed the hunts of the Santee Gun Club members, including many attempts to navigate in thick fog. Some of his work included law enforcement, and he talked about several episodes where people tried to steal old bricks from historic structures in SCR. In his 21 years at SCR there was only one episode of an accidental shooting on a hunt, and through a heroic effort by one of the guides the victim survived. SCR had significant damage from Hurricane Hugo (1989), and of many issues it took half a year to rebuild the dikes. Mace reviewed many of the conservation protections in place on the Delta’s public and private lands. He retired from the state in 2010, and went back to work as manager of Annandale Plantation, a tract of private lands (around 3500 acres) owned by Dan Ray on the north side of the Santee Rivers. He is doing similar work to what he did at SCR in managing rice fields for waterfowl. Mace lives nearby, and though he once thought of retiring to the North Carolina coast, he now can’t imagine living anywhere else. He also touched on the seasonal challenges of mosquitoes in the Delta.
